Why don’t we teach ornamentation?
I asked a very gifted and experienced band pedagogue once if he taught improvising to his middle school students. He told me the 8th grade students could elect to join the jazz band. End of story.
This is weird. I understand that it’s convenient and somewhat pedagogically efficient to situate improvisation in the jazz idiom. Jazz requires more improvising than wind band and orchestral literature (for now). But the awkward and ineffective parsing of creative study into “jazz” doesn’t just ineptly prepare young musicians for a musical life out of the band/choir/orchestra paradigm. It implies a troubling relationship between technique and expression: creativity later, technique now.
It is a mistake to continue a broken tradition of prioritizing compliance over musical expression. It is a mistake to teach students explicitly or implicitly that creativity is only available after technique. Instead, music study should be characterized by a coordinated emergence of technique and expression. More accurately, well-designed learning teaches technique through an expressive intent. We learn to play our best when we want to make more beautiful sounds.
This isn’t a particularly fresh take on music education, but within the secondary music paradigm in the United States (and the dominating trio of band/orchestra/choir), creativity is all too often the proverbial can kicked down the road, reserved for those with more advanced skill, or interest in specialization. I also know that making any changes to how band is taught in this country presents an existential threat to a host of thriving industries, organizations, and identities. Rather than rock-the-boat in a big way, I want to suggest the following to a stubborn subversive ensemble leader somewhere who doesn’t mind going just a little against the grain: teach ornamentation and creative embellishment from day one.
Why don’t beginning programs teach ornamentation?
Ok, they do, but it usually comes pretty late, and it also usually comes with a lot of rules. Even the first embellishment that most young wind/brass students learn in the US, vibrato, is weird and for no great reason, steeped in dogma. Flutes wiggle, usually fast, but not you, clarinets. Euphoniums, go all the way to town, but French horns, nope. Trills and grace notes are introduced with thorny conventions about when to start them and how fast they should be. Problematically, everything after vibrato is strictly notated. By gosh, you better trill where it says trill, and you better not trill where it does not say to trill. The decision is not the players’ to make. Ornamentation becomes not an honest-to-goodness embellishment, but just something else you have to do like the rest of the dots on the page. That’s not how sincere musical embellishment works.
Sincere embellishment is a personal stamp on an established convention. It is not a rule to follow, or even a replica of another’s music. It is a viable step in the creative process that uses convention to afford expression through the performer. We allow this in the singing of the anthem at sporting events, when the embellishments are very good (Whitney Houston) and bad (sorry, Fergie). Why can’t we figure out how to teach this concept to young instrumentalists in a way that encourages exploration and allows expressive technique to emerge with creative drive. Would it really be so bad if more young students were able to play like this?
Can’t we teach how to ornament better?
Jazz teachers know this need. For many students, flexibly stretching, molding, adding to, and subtracting from known melodies is an intuitive gateway to melodic improvising. By understanding how to manipulate melodies, students begin to deconstruct and play with melodic elements. These are the features of great improvisors, sure, but they are also the features of any great musician in any genre.
Good musicians diligently do what’s on the page: nothing more, nothing less. Good music students are compliant.
Great musicians play compelling melodies because they manipulate them, using the page as a canvas, not a prescription. Great music students comply as needed to optimize expression. Extinguishing creativity in early study is orders of magnitude more harmful to music learning than a low score on an adjudication sheet.
Teach beginners to change and shape notes immediately, freely, and consistently. Give them the space to ornament and embellish with abandon when they are young, and their expressive vocabulary will take root.
Every teacher reading this knows exactly what would probably happen if a middle school band were suddenly given the right to “ornament” a piece of band music. I’m not too naïve about that chaos. I’m arguing that chaos will not last very long with a caring teacher. There will be minutes of chaos at first, then those turn into seconds of chaos, and then, as the teacher facilitates a safe creative space (many other thoughts about this for sure, but not here), the students begin taking charge of their right and freedom to express when and how they engage with musical material. Although certainly not a guarantee, students can develop a dialog with the music.
I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying it’s possible. And simply because it’s possible, someone should be working to see how this could work.
